Letters - Direction - Theme 1

Salesian Spirituality: Six Themes

Theme I:

“I am as human as anyone could possibly be.”

(Francis de Sales in a letter to Jane de Chantal, Oeuvres XIII, 330)

Any spirituality rests upon, or better yet, includes a set of assumptions about God and humankind and about how they are related to each other. Salesian spirituality, historically situated as it is in French Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the turn of the seventeenth century, carries within itself a view of the human-divine drama that is consonant with the theological and devotional atmosphere of that period and place. This was an era in which Christian humanism, which had taken recent impetus from the humanist revival of the preceding century, was in full flower.[1] In general, this oriental approached theological questions from the human point of view, affirming the innate dignity of the person. It believed that human nature, while wounded, was not corrupted by the fall, and thus retained a natural orientation to God as its supernatural end; that humans could and must cooperate with divine grace in the accomplishment of saving works; that God does not predestine individuals to salvation or damnation absolutely but “foresees” their appointed ends by taking into consideration their efforts and merits, which are in turn the fruits of (relatively) free human choice.

With these general assertions providing a backdrop against which Salesian spirituality was played out, it is easy to see from whence the oft-used term “Salesian optimism” takes its origin.[2] The God beheld and entrusted with human destiny is, for Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal, first of all a God of love and merciful compassion. De Sales in fact constructed his most ambitious work, Treatise on the Love of God, around this Christian humanist portrait of divinity. In book two of that lengthy tome he describes, in lively fashion, the loving God who from all eternity desired to be in intimate communion with the creation. Despite the fall of humankind, which resulted from free choice and which God foresaw, God nonetheless reached into the heart of creation and offered it redemption through the loving sacrifice of the Son. Moreover, God, out of the fullness of abundance, gives to each creature grace sufficient freely to participate in his or her own salvation. And God desires greatly that each person be drawn to the intimate communion for which he or she was created.

See the divine lover at the gate. He does not simply knock once. He continues to knock. He calls the soul: come, arise my beloved, hurry! And he puts his hand on the lock to see whether he can open it… In short, this divine Saviour forgets nothing to show that his mercies are above all his works, his mercy is greater than his judgement, that his redemption is copious, his love is infinite and, as the Apostle says, he is rich in mercy and so he desires that all should be saved and none perish.[3]

In humankind Salesian thought sees a corresponding impulse to respond to the love lavished upon it by its God. God touches each individual with grace, a gratuitously given invitation to union. It is up to each person to respond. The Treatise treats in detail the Genevan bishop’s theoretical understanding of the reception, growth, consummation, and possible deterioration of the love in the soul for its God. Throughout, the over-arching impression is one of the generosity, liberality, and affective quality of the human-divine courtship to which all are invited.

This radical view of a lovingly inclined God had implications for the Salesian understanding of who was called to authentic Christian life. Put bluntly, all were called. Clerics, vowed religious, lay persons, men and women in all walks and states of life were intended to exercise their deepest human capacities in a unique and creative marriage with the God who created them.

For in Salesian thinking the human person is believed to be made in the divine likeness and image. Drawn to union with divinity by the affinity of natures and propelled by the power of mutual love, the human person, no matter what his or her visible vocation, had a more compelling and far-reaching vocation – to realize his or her fullest capacity for love of God. There is in this a wholistic understanding of the way this love of God comes to be lived out in each person. This love has, to use de Sales’ own phrase, two arms. One arm is the affective love of God known especially in prayer. The other is the effective love of God known by the loving actions directed toward neighbour, and also described as conformity to the will of God.[4] With the whole of his or her inner and outer capacities, a man or a woman responds to the essential truth of human nature, a nature created and, though wounded by original sin, still capable, through an ever-increasing identification with the living Jesus, of realizing the divine marriage to which it is drawn.

Implied in this optimistic view of human capacity is an appreciation for the created world and for the human arts. There is little in Salesian thought that could be pronounced world-denying in the sense that matter itself or the society of other people or the works of human hands are in and of themselves suspect from a religious point of view. The vaguely anti-material bias which haunts much of Christian spirituality is virtually absent from Salesian thought. For a Christian humanist such as de Sales love and the appreciation of beauty went hand in hand. Beauty is order and harmony; it is an intrinsic grace which has its origins in the divine beauty. All that is beautiful, harmonious, good, and graceful in the world participates in God by virtue of those qualities. The contemplation of beauty, then, for the humanist tradition that Francis acquainted with at Padua, can lead to the contemplation of God. Salesian spirituality is marked in its celebration of whatever in the created order participates in the beauty evocative of God.[5]

As has been noted previously, part of that beauty was to be found in the person – “l’honnête homme” – who cultivated both an interior and exterior gracefulness. Francis de Sales was indeed the embodiment of the man whose human capacities were consciously cultivated to most clearly mirror and direct others’ to focus to the graciously inclining God. Jane de Chantal and the daughters of the Visitation also moved within the world of Christian humanism but their reflection of that tradition was not identical to that of their friend and founder, Francis. It perhaps has not been appreciated that in the Renaissance humanist tradition there were assumptions about the education and character development of women that corresponded to the assumptions held about men. The formation of the feminine character was felt to be primarily an affair of moral shaping and not of intellectual pursuit for its own sake.[6] The general picture that emerges from treatises circulating at the time indicates that education for women consisted in the inculcation of the moral qualities considered necessary to female innocence: humility, simplicity, modesty, piety, patience, obedience. While most of these virtues are also foundational virtues in the traditional monastic view of the Christian life, within the Visitation they became the key virtues to be acquired. These qualities came to be incorporated into the order as its own specific charism, the quality of piety and personal deportment that made the order distinctive.[7] Francis and Jane referred to them as the “little virtues.” It was, looked at from this perspective, a very “feminine” and “humanistic” charism. The attainment of other Christian virtues – such as courage, fortitude or justice – while not entirely absent from the ideals of the Visitation, were subordinated to the qualities deemed in the humanistic tradition proper for the attainment of authentic and graceful womanhood.

Salesian spirituality was not simply humanistic in the technical sense of belonging to those spiritualities that are rooted in Christian humanist thought. It was also a very “human devotion” in the ordinary sense of that phrase. Francis and Jane both had a very human touch. Their thoughts and advice on things of the spirit were generally down to earth. They had what has been termed “inspired common sense”[8] and their letters of direction were as often as not concerned with the practical implementation of their spiritual principles within the ordinary context of ordinary lives. Neither otherworldly nor world-denying, they saw the live of devotion as something that should enhance everyday humane experience and, in turn, human experience as something that should ground and inform devotion. One is struck by the practical nature of the suggestions Jane de Chantal gives to her own natural daughter about marriage and family life, advice that is no less spiritual and grounded in a radical Christian vision for its being given in such a practical, and ordinary manner. One is also struck by the common sense maternal wisdom that guides Jane as she directs her spiritual daughters within the community of the Visitation.

Human and divine were, in Salesian thought, inextricably entwined. Francis’s famous phrase “I am as human as anyone could possibly be” does not suggest a modest appraisal of his own capabilities, but suggests rather that in his mind his very humanity was in fact the vessel which could contain the miracle of divine life.[9] To be human meant in the Salesian world to have a deep interest in all that is human – especially in the affections, in people’s hearts. Whatever is deeply personal and most heartfelt is the stuff of the Salesian spirituality. To become fully human one plumbs the resources that one has been given, one searches through the deepest loves of one’s heart. There one finds affirmed the fact that there is a correspondence and a similarity of the human and divine realities. The methods and concerns of Salesian spirituality, its vision of the nature of God and of humankind, its whole tonality is vibrant with this intuition.

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[1] On Christian humanism in this period consult the classic Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours, Vol.I (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1921), English translation: A Literary History of Religious Though in France from the Wars of Religion Down to Our Own Times (New York: Macmillan Co., 1930); Julien Eymard d’Angers, L’humanisme chrétien au XVIIe siècle: St. François de Sales et Yves de Paris (LaHaye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970); Louis Cognet, De la devotion moderne à la spiritualité française (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1958).

[2] For a discussion of the origin of Francis de Sales’ optimism see Henri Lemaire, François de Sales, Docteur de la confiance et de la paix (Paris: Beuchesne, 1963), pp. 19-30. Also, William Marceau, CSB, Optimism in the Works of St. Francis de Sales (Visakhapatnam, India: SFS Publications, 1983).

[3] Oeuvres, IV, 114; Treatise on the Love of God, Book 2, chapter 8.

[4] On this see Treatise on the Love of God, Books VIII and IX.

[5] An interesting discussion of the Italian Renaissance background to de Sales’ Christian aesthetic as well as an analysis of the idea of beauty in the Introduction is found in James S. Langelaan, OSFS, Man in Love with God: Introduction to the Theology and Spirituality of St. Francis de Sales (Hyattsville, MD, unpublished paper, 1976).

[6] Cf. Phyllis Stock, Better Than Rubies: A History of Women’s Education (New York: G.P. Putnam’s sons, 1978), pp. 29-40. The Renaissance and the Reformation were periods in western culture that saw the development of women’s education. There were a number of stated reasons for this: to instil moral character, to raise male children more conscientiously, to be suitable companions to learned men, to encourage authentic piety. While there were champions of women’s intellectual equality, for the most part, the motives underlying women’s education were, by modern standards, questionable. See Paul Rousselot, Histoire de l’éducation des femmes en France (New York: Lenox Hill Pub. – Burt Franklin, 1971. Original publication, 1883), Georges Snyders, La Pédagogie en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), and Gabriel Compayre, Histoire critique des doctrines de l’éducation en France depuis le seizième siècle (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970, Original publication, 1879).

[7] Cf. Wendy M. Wright, “St. Jane de Chantal’s Guidance to Women” in Salesian Living Heritage, Vol. I, No. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 16-28).

[8] Elisabeth Stopp in her introduction to Francis’ letters, pp. 33-34, coins this phrase. Cf. St. Francis de Sales, Selected Letters (N.Y.: Harper & Bros., 1960).

[9] Francis’s phrase “Je suis tant homme que rien plus” has not generally been translated in this way. Given his use of “si… que rien plus” in other places and emboldened by Henri Lemaire’s Lexique des oeuvres completes de François de Sales (Paris: Editions A.G. Nizet, 1973), p. 382, we have struggled to find an English equivalent that suggests something of the subtlety of the saint’s terse phrase.

LETTERS OF St. FRANCIS DE SALES

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St. Francis de Sales presents a spirituality that can be practised by everyone in all walks of life